Community
Civil 3D Forum
Welcome to Autodesk’s Civil 3D Forums. Share your knowledge, ask questions, and explore popular AutoCAD Civil 3D topics.
cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Another Vault issue with a shared working folder

8 REPLIES 8
Reply
Message 1 of 9
Anonymous
178 Views, 8 Replies

Another Vault issue with a shared working folder

I just found another problem with a shared working folder on a network
share. If User A has drawings 1 and 2 checked out and User B checks out
drawing 3 that xrefs drawings 1 and 2, User B can not check drawing 3 back
in until User A checks both drawings in. I got an Error 1103 when I tried to
check in drawing 3. Once I had the other user checkin drawings 1 and 2, I
was able to check in drawing 3 without any errors.

Tom Berning
Civil 3D 2007 SP1a
Windows 2003 server for Vault with SQL Express 2005
8 REPLIES 8
Message 2 of 9
Anonymous
in reply to: Anonymous

I agree Tom that there are a ton of workflow issues that need to be worked out.
Nothing is quite what it seems, at least in a multi-user environment.
The silence from Manchester on these issues is deafening.
It appears that the design team working on the project really has to be in tune with all of the other players in order to succeed. And communication among participants has always been a problem, and it looks like this just makes it worse.
Next month we are trying to go live on an apartment job site and we will certainly be working the product at the edge of it's published capabilities.
Please keep posting here and feel free to contact me directly at jpostlewaitatgbutlerdotcom.
Pretty complicated process.
We all need all the help we can get.
Welcome to the point of the spear.

John Postlewait
IS Department
George Butler Associates, Inc.
Message 3 of 9
Anonymous
in reply to: Anonymous

jpostlewait wrote:
> I agree Tom that there are a ton of workflow issues that need to be
> worked out. Nothing is quite what it seems, at least in a multi-user
> environment. The silence from Manchester on these issues is
> deafening. It appears that the design team working on the project
> really has to be in tune with all of the other players in order to
> succeed. And communication among participants has always been a
> problem, and it looks like this just makes it worse. Next month we
> are trying to go live on an apartment job site and we will certainly
> be working the product at the edge of it's published capabilities.
> Please keep posting here and feel free to contact me directly at
> jpostlewaitatgbutlerdotcom. Pretty complicated process. We all need
> all the help we can get. Welcome to the point of the spear.


You're right, John - we do need all the help that we can get, and
there's just not that much out there. Some people have really dived in
(dove?) and figured out some things on their own (your current situation
is proof positive of that!), but there's no real support out there - any
white papers reference Vault with Inventor. You find just a few pages
about Vault with Civil 3D in the Vault courseware - not even enough to
count.

James Wedding brought up a very good point on the phone the other night
- nobody has told me yet that Vault is EXACTLY what they need/want.
Don't get me wrong about Vault - the functionality is WONDERFUL for
mechanical users (the intended audience). For Civil Engineering firms,
the changes in workflow are disruptive enough to warrant some companies
not to even upgrade.

There is definitely a LOT of work to be done to provide project
functionality to Civil users. I think (hope?) that Vault was just a
shot in the dark. OK, it missed the target (in it's current form, at
least). Hopefully, the gun will be re-aimed and another target hit.

Don't get me wrong - I think Vault COULD be the thing that works, but
it's still got a ways to go. Right now, it's a MAJOR stumbling block
to most people.

Don't take the above "rant" the wrong way - I continue to make it
work for my clients.

--
Jason Hickey
Message 4 of 9
Anonymous
in reply to: Anonymous

In an effort to get everyone on the same page, I am going to summarize several of the posts I have found useful in regards to Vault and working paths. Hope everyone finds this at least halfway useful.

MY thoughts now on the working folder. We have tossed the idea around from shared to local working folder for quite sometime. I began to be convinced to use the shared working folder, but now I am not so sure.

I am now beginning to revert back to my original opinion like Tom Berning has stated in a post... "The only solution I see is to setup the same exact working folder on everyone's local hard drive so the paths will remain the same for data references."

An interesting thing we noticed while experimenting... if you have a dwg in the vault, you xref a dwg outside of the vault... vault will actually bring the parent folder of the xrefed dwg INTO the vault project structure (and consequently into the working path file structure). This seems really strange (and maybe there is a way around this.

--nobody has told me yet that Vault is EXACTLY what they need/want--Jason Hickey, James Wedding
I hear you there fellas... but I have a feeling vault is worth it. I do however miss the ease of use in file explorer 😞 Wonder if there would be a way for vault to still do its thing but still have the traditional file structure we are used to?? Not even have a check-in check-out... just an attach to project?? Ah well, we cant have everything!

"Vault shared working folder"
http://discussion.autodesk.com/thread.jspa?threadID=482877

"Xref from Vault"
http://discussion.autodesk.com/thread.jspa?threadID=481816
http://cwcivil3d.blogspot.com/2006/06/xrefing-from-vault.html
Xrefing this way might save some headaches with the working path?? Worth a try at least.

"Vault 5 with Civli 3D "
http://discussion.autodesk.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5193258
This is a very informative post that is well worth the reading. CAUTION... I know a little more about vault than I did at the time of some of these postings, so don't hold previous statements against me 😉 John P. and James Wedding... I know you fellas (among others of course) were leaning toward a shared working folder. Any thoughts on some of the issues stated here?

"vault design folder vs drawing folder"
http://discussion.autodesk.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5193751
Here James even says "Using a local working folder is
dumb." Ouch! You still totally into the shared working folder James? I agree with you for all the same reasons it is nice. BTW... did I mention we actually have our first vault "2006" (we plan to have yearly vaults) setup for shared working folders?

Hmmm. I guess time will tell what to do. What a great July 4! Raining strong here in Indiana.

Clem
---------------------------------
Civil 3D 2007, SP1A
Dell Precision 670
Dual 3.0 gHz Xeons, 2 GB RAM
nVidia Quadro FX 3450 (256 MB)
Dual 21" LCD screens
Windows XP Pro SP2
Message 5 of 9
Anonymous
in reply to: Anonymous

Yep, still with it. Local Working Folder is dumb. It makes it impossible for
anyone downstream to accurately get data mapping correctly.

I'm loading up yet another lab machine this morning, and will be testing
scenarios with Xrefs based on Tom's questions today.

--
James Wedding, P.E.
Engineered Efficiency, Inc.
Civil 3D 2007
XP Tablet, SP2, 2GHz, 2G
www.eng-eff.com
www.civil3d.com
Message 6 of 9
Anonymous
in reply to: Anonymous

cskuns wrote:

> --nobody has told me yet that Vault is EXACTLY what they
> need/want--Jason Hickey, James Wedding I hear you there fellas... but
> I have a feeling vault is worth it. I do however miss the ease of
> use in file explorer 😞 Wonder if there would be a way for vault to
> still do its thing but still have the traditional file structure we
> are used to?? Not even have a check-in check-out... just an attach
> to project?? Ah well, we cant have everything!


FWIW, I agree with you Clem - Vault CAN be worth it, just with a little
more work put into it. It definitely has it's merits.

And now it's time to go cut grass. Believe it or not, one of the most
relaxing things I can do these days....

--
Jason Hickey
Message 7 of 9
Anonymous
in reply to: Anonymous

Happy 4th Clem,

The overwhelming reason for the network working folder is that's about all I can back-up.
In a multi-user, multi-disciplined environment I just can't function without nightly incremental back-ups.
At this point the Vault back-up and restore procedure is kindly characterized as crude.
Maybe in a shop that had 1 project= 1 guy working on it, local working folder might make a lot of sense.
In talking with my reseller's Vault guy, who came from inventor, It made a lot of sense to work locally due to the time it took to load 1 model with say 500 assemblies in it. Plus that product tended toward the 1 guy 1 project model.

>>but now I am not so sure.<<

I think that goes for all of us, in some manner or another.

John Postlewait
IS Department
George Butler Associates, Inc.
Message 8 of 9
c__h
in reply to: Anonymous

Hmmm... I had thought that a shared working folder was the way to go as well, but even then, we cannot get the working folder to fit into our directory structure.

But if there are even more problems like this one, then we have no chance of implementing it anytime soon.

I like the ideas of the Vault, but in practice, I just don't think it will work for us in its current form.

I really hope it is refined so its usable for us. I want to use 2007 but without the vault, and trying to use the crippled data references, our multi-user projects will be just too hard to use.
Message 9 of 9
Anonymous
in reply to: Anonymous

James... I look forward to hearing from you on your experimenting! I thought we had tried about every scenario, but sounds like there are more. I am sure glad we have shared working folders going right now... I would hate to do something "dumb" 😉

All... we have sort of given up on having the working folder actually having a nice structure to it 😞 As I stated previously, you xref a dwg outside of the vault and the vault brings in a folder with the dwg. Of course this might act differently if one used the "attach dwg from vault" option as discussed in the blog above.

Currently we are setup with a yearly vault (say "2006). The working path is "P:\2006" (the shared project path). So when we create a project in C3D, it makes a path viewed in file explorer as "P:\2006\06356-Project Name". When we attach a dwg to the project however, we use the option in C3D of creating a subfolder. Currently we create a sub-folder called "vault". On the file explorer side of things, this folder path (working path) would be "P:\2006\06356-Project Name\Vault". This then is the location ALL data associated with vault will reside. Kind of a "hands off this area" sign if you see that path in file explorer. SO... when any dwg is attached to vault in a project, it would be placed into this "vault" subfolder or some subfolder of it (possibly a subfolder called "survey" and/or "construction plans").

In addition to the "vault" subfolder... we manually create another subfolder alongside it in file explorer. This will be for any project data not associated with vault. We call this simply "project data". SO... if you are going to look at a spreadsheet, drainage calcs, reports, etc via file explorer, one knows to go to the "P:\2006\06356-Project Name\Project Data" path. The advantage? General users dont have to know much more than "dont mess around with stuff in the "vault" folder... go to the "project data folder for stuff you need that does not reside in vault". Of course another good thing is the fact that all vault data is accessible via file explorer (for those users that really know what they are doing and for backup purposes). All the other benefits of the shared working folder previously discussed by others as well. The really nice thing... if you want to rearrange folders and files in the vault (using vault explorer)... when you are done, go to file explorer, delete the vault data in the "vault" subfolder and then use the "get folder contents" in vault. The working path immediately repopulates just how vault has it setup. With our rather simple file structure, we dont have to worry as much about vault files being scattered all over the place.

Of course I am tossing ideas into the wind to help others... and to hear other's ideas! Slowly, this thing is being revealed 😉 I do agree with some of you that there could stand to be some enhancements to this vault thing. To really make it work good, you need to understand a LOT of stuff that the average user will not want to or will not be feasibly able to understand. Thanks to all the ideas so far!

The wife is saying "are you going to come eat?!" so I better get off here.

Clem

Can't find what you're looking for? Ask the community or share your knowledge.

Post to forums  

Rail Community


Autodesk Design & Make Report